BY MATTHEW RUDY
Matt Henderson, PGA,PGA of America Director of Instruction,TPC Las Vegas (Nevada)
Matt Henderson has sent dozens of competitive juniors on to Division I golf, but the advice he gives the parents of the potential next one is usually a surprise. He wants to see their kid less, not more.
Henderson is the PGA of America Director of Instruction at TPC Las Vegas, and he has spent more than a decade watching well-intentioned parents view a coach as the main engine for a young player’s improvement.
“I think less coaching, but the right coaching, is the right approach,” says Henderson, the 2021 Southwest PGA Section Teacher & Coach of the Year. “The players who thrive at every new level are the ones who learn – and then learn how to run their own games.”
That core belief shapes not only the coaching relationships he has with competitive juniors, but also the clients he takes on. Henderson keeps his competitive player roster small – about four at a time – and he’s as deliberate about evaluating the parents as the kid.
“Youth sports have lost their mind,” he says. “Players leave the system because there isn’t a match between what they want and what their parents have in terms of expectations. Everybody has to be on the same page in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish.”
Henderson cites a current Major League Baseball pitcher and client with some of the best advice he’s heard for sports parents.
“Parents’ goals for their kids are relative to the parents’ success,” Henderson quotes. “The ones who get it are the usually the ones who have played themselves. They know how much it takes, where pushing works and where it doesn’t. They don’t ride every high and low.”
The common threads for Henderson’s most successful elite junior players are internal drive and a love for the game.
“Golf might still be their second sport, but they love it and they can’t wait to put in the hours,” he says. “They look forward to playing 18 holes four or five days a week, which is the only way to really get better.”
Henderson obviously can’t play those rounds for them, so he builds his coaching structure to promote that independence. He moved his competitive juniors from weekly lessons to biweekly. The spread-out cadence reduces the tendency to use lessons as a crutch.
“Two weeks encourages a player to problem-solve for himself or herself,” says Henderson, a Golf Digest Best Young Teacher. “We don’t build tips or fixes. We build systems of problem-solving actions. A player will come in and say that they had an issue, but they worked through it. That’s when they really begin to own it.”
The coaching impulse is often to try to help players avoid failure, but Henderson embraces mistakes and friction. A hard week grinding on a stubborn miss teaches more than a correction would, he explains.
“If a player is constantly getting a correction or cue from me or from a parent, what happens when those cues aren’t there?” he asks.
“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is empower you to run your own golf game. We’ll work together so that you understand your own swing enough to go through those check-downs and fix things when they go wrong.”
The long-term benefits of that approach show up in competitive rounds where players don’t have their best stuff.
“When you have a process, you can find that structure on the third or fourth hole and do something to get the most out of the round you’re playing right now,” says Henderson. “You’re less likely to give up and write off the whole round.
“You’ll hear players like Scottie Scheffler say that they’re proud of how they found something and scraped it around. As the level of competition increases, everybody is better, and they all can really score when everything is working. It’s this other part that separates the players who make it.”
